Sherlock and The Woman

The Party Hat

3. The party hat

Sherlock's head felt as if it was filled with lead and somewhere at the back of his skull he heard a faint ringing noise. Slowly - oh, so very slowly - he felt his senses return, though it felt like he was kicking water to slowly go anywhere.

"Come on now, be a good boy for daddy, Sherlock. It's time to wakey-wakey," a distant voice hummed in a sing-song voice that immediately had the detective's cloudy attention.

He attempted to open his eyes, but they, too, felt like heavy weights. Finally he managed to crack one eye open and saw something he had now both dreaded and expected for over two years. He closed his eye once more to try and clear his head, before attempting to open both eyes again. He did and took in his surroundings.

Sherlock found himself tied to a chair in the middle of an empty, old basement that seemed quite large, at least twenty-five meters across. His sensitive nose picked up a distant smell: they were definitely close to water. He strained his ears to pick up any noise from the outside world and recognized several cars and a loud buzz of people. Only a heavy business district would still be so full of life and stress at such a late hour.

A door on the wall about ten meters to Sherlock's left was open and outside he see a backyard of some sort in the darkness of the winter night. An apartment complex perhaps. He quickly worked through the possibilities in his mind and finally decided he was close to Millwall's inner docks. Having deduced his whereabouts in just over a minute, Sherlock raised his head to gaze up at the figures ahead.

A few meters before him stood two large men, buffalo-sized almost, clad in suits and with matching faces of impassiveness. They seemed to be your average guard, or if you strained it: perhaps they could be henchmen of some sort. Sherlock recognized them easily as the two men who had thrown him into the car earlier.

The man frowned as he fought against the bonds of his sluggish thoughts. Had he not seen…? Surely he had.

He barely had time to register his own thought when a man, also dressed in a classic suit, jumped out from behind one of the massive guards. The complete look of mad joy shone in the man's eyes and Sherlock barely registered the bright, colored party hat atop of Moriarty's head.

"Surprise!" Moriarty shouted but the detective only managed a slow frown in response. When Sherlock didn't react any further, the criminal mastermind seemed visibly offended.

"Let's try it again," the man said and snuck behind the guard once more. A second later he jumped out just like the first time and enthusiastically repeated, "Surprise!"

"…Jim?" the groggy Sherlock managed.

Moriarty sighed and shrugged as he glanced between the two guards. "Not what I was looking for, but I'll take it. Yes, Sherlock. It's me... Miss me?"

"Not very much," the dark-haired man muttered and shook his head to clear it. He hated not being able to think clearly. It meant his greatest weapon was useless. If the cloudiness of his mind was because of whatever drug he had been given, or from a later received blow, Sherlock couldn't quite deduce.

"I missed you a lot, Sherlock," Moriarty pointed out and strolled up to the man's chair before crouching down before him. "These past few years I've only met more ordinary people,"- he said the last part in his own unique voice of mockery, -"…Boring! Being around idiots for a long time makes me long for my own company. And there's only two of me, as you know. ...Of course, Ms. Adler is quite extraordinary herself, though I'm not quite sure how to define her. Is she ordinary, Sherlock?"

The detective shook his head and focused his eyes on his nemesis' soulless ones. "That's not the word I'd use to describe her, no."

"No, I didn't think so either. She's more like you and I," Moriarty smiled distantly and his gaze intensely searched Sherlock's face in a way the detective didn't fully understand. Suddenly, the mad man jumped up from his crouched position with a wide grin on his face. "Oh! I almost forgot! This is for you!"